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Friday, 18 October 2013 10:25

Content Marketing: What is it all about?

With the media landscape ever changing and new channels arising regularly, consumers are being pulled further and further away from traditional media. It is important for marketers to understand this and look into new ways of reaching their audience.

One way that is becoming a hot topic in the industry is Content Marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is the creation and sharing of valuable and relevant content, with the intent not to sell, but to attract, engage and build a relationship with a target audience. It should be compelling, consistent, and ultimately drive consumer action, whether that be buying, referring, or sharing your content.  You want your target audience to start a conversation, which means your content needs to be interesting and even educational in terms of your company, product, or service.  Getting the audience to trust your knowledge enough to reference you and use your company is the ultimate goal.

Sound difficult?  For some it might be.  Having the personnel to create the content is a hurdle, that is why having a content strategy is important.  A content strategy is like a road map to your content creation.

Two places to being your strategy are a mission statement and buyer persona.  The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) suggests that a mission statement should have 3 parts:

  1. Who is the audience?

  2. What useful information are you delivering

  3. What is the pain point you are helping

Once you have a solid mission statement, creating a buyer persona is the next step.  This helps create a story to reach each person as well as which media channels to use and which not to. CMI suggests building out different pieces of unique content for each story which can then be used for the media channel it is best suited for.

This all may sounds like a lot, but the key points here are that good content marketing creates a conversation, and ultimately a relationship, with your target audience which benefits your business in the end by creating long term and repeat buyers.

Comments, feedback, or input about content marketing?  We would love to hear from you!

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